21″ Feb”2023
The possibility of life going back to normal in southern Turkey was shattered after a magnitude 6.3 earthquake rattled the Turkey-Syria border area on Monday night.
It was a reawakening of the recent trauma in Gaziantep, which was among the 10 provinces in Turkey devastated by earthquakes that killed more than 47,000 people in the country and neighbouring Syria
For years, Turkey has pursued an approach that stresses international aid and development after what the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) articulated in 2013 as “humanitarian diplomacy”, or more recently as an “enterprising and humanitarian foreign policy”.
While shows of global solidarity and pledges of support often accompany massive natural disasters, the reputation cultivated by Ankara in recent years has, at least in part, been reflected in the international response to the devastating earthquakes that have rocked the country and neighbouring Syria since February 6.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif specifically cited Turkey’s past support as he pledged solidarity, telling Anadolu Agency that Ankara “went the extra mile to help their brothers and sisters, whether it was an earthquake in 2005, floods in 2010, or floods last year in Pakistan “.
As of February 18, Turkey said 102 countries had offered assistance, with at least 74 international rescue teams deployed.
Top aid has included $1.78bn from the World Bank, $185m from the United States, and $100m from the United Arab Emirates.
US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said that Washington would continue to provide aid to Turkey “just as Turkey has so often contributed its own humanitarian rescue experts to so many other countries in the past”.
The United Nations resident coordinator in Turkey, Alvaro Rodriguez, pointed to the country’s years-long hosting of about 3.7 million Syrian refugees – which has given the country the world’s largest refugee population amid Syria’s continuing war – as well as aid “Turkey has provided other countries in their time of need”.
“So, people should remember that and be generous because [Turkey] has been generous to others,” he told Anadolu
Nevertheless, the response to the earthquake from several countries dealing with their own crises appears to underline Turkey’s influence.
In drought-ravaged Somalia, where Turkey has spearheaded a wide-scale, at times controversial, development initiative, the government has launched a fundraising push, with legislators voting to provide part of their salaries to Turkish recovery efforts and the country’s business community reportedly pledging $3m in aid.
Appeals for medicine and food from Turkey’s ambassador to Bangladesh – where Turkey has been a key player in providing aid to Rohingya refugees – were quickly met with pledges of support.
The Taliban government in Afghanistan, where Turkey has emerged as a major development player since the group took over in 2021, has pledged $165,000, despite the country’s own dire economic straits
Need still massive
Whatever goodwill Turkey has developed on the global stage also has the potential to dovetail into so-called “disaster diplomacy”, a term describing the more neutral setting in which opposing countries can engage in the wake of natural disasters, according to Grady Wilson, associate director of the Atlantic Council, a US-based think tank, in Turkey.
He noted Greece, Armenia, Sweden and Israel – all countries with which Turkey has had fraught or outright hostile relations – responded with help following the disaster.
“The classic example is the 1999 Turkey-Greece earthquake diplomacy,” he told Al Jazeera. “The mutual assistance and shared loss helped galvanise a normalisation that led to the biggest calm in bilateral relations probably in modern history.
“More broadly, I think countries around the region and globally recognise an opportunity, removed from political complexities, to demonstrate solidarity and generate goodwill. In diplomacy, an opening can be anything.”
